Strangers Bearing Gifts

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Published: August 29, 1999

THE SEXTANTS OF BEIJING

Global Currents in Chinese History.

By Joanna Waley-Cohen.

322 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

In the year A.D. 2, an unusual visitor lumbered off a ship and onto Chinese soil. It was a rhinoceros, sent as a gift from an unidentified country, and it was followed eight years later by an ostrich -- a big hit in the court of the Chinese Emperor.

The presence of exotic animals from distant parts of the world underscores the degree to which ancient China was a hub of the trading world and a very cosmopolitan place. In ''The Sextants of Beijing,'' Joanna Waley-Cohen, a professor of history at New York University, surveys the history of China's relations with foreign countries and takes aim at the assumption that China traditionally has been deeply isolationist.

''The evidence of history simply negates the long-standing myth, propagated since the 18th century primarily by Westerners frustrated by their inability to impose their will on China, of Chinese isolation and isolationism,'' Waley-Cohen writes. She offers a nuanced but ultimately sympathetic account of how Chinese rulers -- down to the present day -- have tried to engage the world but have also been constrained by nationalism and impeded by the scheming of Western powers.

As Waley-Cohen notes, ancient China was exceptionally open to trade; many tens of thousands of foreigners lived in major Chinese cities in the Tang dynasty 1,200 years ago. China's curiosity about the world in ancient times is generally acknowledged, but she boldly argues that these traits continued, to some degree, over the next five centuries. This is a harder case to make. The Qianlong Emperor famously scoffed at British gifts in 1793, saying, ''We have no need for manufactures.'' Waley-Cohen says that Qianlong was lying, partly for domestic political reasons, and she notes that he and other emperors eagerly hired Europeans to improve Chinese cannon and military technologies. Likewise, she says that 19th-century Chinese diplomacy helped make the best of a bad situation, and that the first six decades of the 19th century show above all ''China's remarkable capacity to resist bullying on the part of Westerners who could not imagine a better way of doing things than their own.''

Even in the first few decades of the People's Republic, she argues, China did not isolate itself. Rather, the Communists were engaged with third world countries, and the lack of relations with the West was the fault of both sides. There is something to this, and I found ''The Sextants of Beijing'' thoughtful and highly readable. But fundamentally I don't buy the argument.

Over the last 500 years, China still seems to me to have been relatively isolated and inward-looking both by the standards of the West and by its own historical standards. In 1525, for example, an imperial edict ordered the authorities to destroy all oceangoing ships and arrest the merchants who operated them. By 1850, even India's exports per capita were three times China's.

I have a tough time feeling sympathy for China's later emperors and the constraints they faced, for it is difficult to imagine any country being misruled longer and more tragically than China. Amazingly, its citizens had a significantly lower per capita income in 1952 than they had had at the end of the Song dynasty in the 13th century (according to the estimates of Angus Maddison, an economic historian). China's decline was so staggering -- from the greatest economy the world had ever known to a puny, opium-addicted shell that could be defeated by a few British cannon -- that it cries out for explanation, and I don't know a better one than its increasing social conservatism and introspection beginning in the late 15th century.

Waley-Cohen takes her title from the sextants built by Jesuit missionaries in the 1600's and used in a Beijing observatory. The sextants, she says, are an example of the frustrations that arose when Chinese and Westerners operated at cross-purposes. Jesuits hoped that astronomical virtuosity would win them access to Chinese souls, while China's emperors hoped that accurate observations would consolidate their rule. The sextants, this book suggests, speak too of China's curiosity about other cultures.

Hmmmm. Yes, that is one way of looking at it. But I incline to the traditional view, in which the sextants speak more of Qing dynasty China's intellectual lethargy. China in ancient times invented the magnetic compass and was ahead of Europe in astronomy, and it should have been Chinese scholars building sextants in London and Paris and tutoring Europeans. Yet even the arrival of European sextants did little to revive Chinese science.

Waley-Cohen sees the same historical slide, of course, but she characterizes China as having been not isolationist but ''extremely cautious.'' She emphasizes quite rightly that there were reasons for caution: ''In the imperialist 19th century, Chinese resistance to Western demands for 'free trade' led many Westerners to characterize China as profoundly conservative, but it would be more accurate to speak of China's insistence on independence in the face of Western aggression; what the West called free did not seem so to China.''

In the end, I disagreed with much of the thesis of this book, but that is not to say that I disliked it. On the contrary, I probably liked it more for disagreeing with it. Partly because of the boldness of the argument, it is stimulating and refreshing, and the history itself is sensibly organized and engagingly told.

Moreover, the book is both right and relevant in emphasizing the longstanding Chinese ambivalence about Western culture, and Waley-Cohen traces it well into the 1990's. Just as the Qianlong Emperor wanted first-rate Western astronomy and military technology but was apprehensive that foreign diplomats and traders might undermine his rule, so the Communist Party wants modern computer systems but is worried about the subversive effects of the information revolution sweeping in from the West.

The modern version of the ''sextants of Beijing'' is the Internet, and to the authorities it represents what the sextants did: a Western technology with tantalizing opportunities and also a frightening subversive potential. Fortunately for Chinese and Americans alike, China today seems more aggressive about embracing the Internet than it was about embracing the sextants.

Nicholas D. Kristof recently completed an assignment as Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times and is co-author of ''China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power.''